Castle Nimbus

A Boy Was Born

Let's start with the material, then, shall we? It all begins with a body six feet and five inches tall from the ground and at least a third as broad at the shoulders. The body is topped with a rat of brown hair tied back in a ponytail that falls past the shoulderblades to almost half way down the back. The eyes are blue, the skin is pale, and the clothes are typically dark, grey, red or blue.

Beyond the material we have the statistical. This begins many years ago on a cool sunday in March. The date was the thirteenth and the year was nineteen eighty-eight. A boy was born into a hospital in Farnborough, Kent, England. This boy spent his first three years living near London before the family moved further out, into a place called Rainham where he then spent the rest of his life to now.

Past the statistical, there is the personal. Ther personal begins with his childhood. The boy was bullied by people who had nothing better to do with their time, and he never understood the reasons. His education suffered early on partly because of his being bullied, and partly because the teachers couldn't work well with a boy who could not learn the way they tried to teach. When the boy was seen for what he was, finally, by a psychiatrist, he was given the help he needed and he flourished, flaunting his latent intelligence to his new teachers and earning praise.

Spiritually, the boy was strange in his beliefs. He understood the logic of Solipsism, a difficult concept to fully grasp, and so could prove nothing but that he existed. As simple a system as this was, it was lonely.

Now the boy did not do well with the world of work. As much as he might try, the line of work he was trying to enter was still almost exclusively populated by women, and so he was turned away, ignored, or even in some cases insulted by the ignorance of others. The boy didn't dispair, because in this time he found love; he found reason to believe in more than just himself. This love gave him an idea, and he followed through with it, beginning College afresh for the last time, making his way towards University, there to study English and move on to teach.

The boy learned that love was difficult, rocky and imperfect, but worth more than could be measured. He met his love in person and learned what it felt like to be drunk on feeling, and he listened, for the first time, to what she was saying. Through her, the boy found God.

This love did not last; at least not as one would wish this kind of love to last. She broke away from him, and he was broken for a while, but he forced himself to attack life with new vigor in order to recover from the pain of it. He fought the tide, and outcried the tears. The boy wrote and read and worked and played with fire in his heart where once there had been love, and he struggled all the while to keep learning to trust in the world.

And this is where we find the boy today; learning to teach, learning to love, learning to live.

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